Rose Macaulay's And No Man's Wit
and Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls:
Two Spanish Civil War Novels and Questions of Canonicity

by D. A. Boxwell

Fiction enthusiasts in October 1940 could read two new novels about the
Spanish Civil War from first-rank publishing houses. Both well-known and
established writers drew their titles from the writings of John Donne to make
sympathetic statements about the crushing defeat of Republican Spain. American
literary consumers could base their purchasing and borrowing decisions on
equally favorable 1100-word reviews of the novels in The New York Times Book
Review. And No Man's Wit "contains some of Rose Macaulay's most
brilliant writing, most incisive and compassionate irony [and] contains too a
sadness that is almost despair. Yet even in war's wider devastation, we can
read her book now for its wit and wisdom," Katherine Woods asserted. The
preceding week, the Times lent its authority to a praiseworthy
assessment of For Whom The Bell Tolls as "the best hook Ernest Hemingway
has written, the fullest, the deepest, the truest" (Adams).

Yet within three years, Hemingway's novel, published by Scribners, had sold
850,000 copies (Lynn 484) and had been made into a "three-hour Technicolor
blockbuster" by Paramount (Higham and Greenberg 117), which paid Hemingway
$136,000 for the movie rights (Lynn). For Whom the Bell Tolls has
subsequently never been out of print, while countless college and university
teachers have placed it on countless syllabi and perpetuated the novel as an
"approved" major American novel for successive generations of students. By
stark contrast, however, Macaulay's novel, published by Little-Brown after its
initial appearance in Britain in June 1940, quickly faded from public
attention. And No Man's Wit was never filmed, has never been reprinted
on either side of the Atlantic, and has not been studied or promoted in the
sacred groves of Academe. Unlike Hemingway's "timeless classic," Macaulay's
novel, which I wish to propose as no less important a statement about the
horrors of the Spanish Civil War, has virtually vanished from the literary
consciousness of the 20th century. What at first retrospective glance is an
apparently level literary "playing field" for these two competing texts in 1940
is soon revealed as a treacherous, and highly gendered, zone of contention.

By tracing the shifting fortunes of the reputations of both authors and their
contemporaneous statements about the Spanish Civil War, I would like to explore
-- at least partially -- the reasons for the effacement of Macaulay's
achievement from the literary landscape and the process of canonization which
has insistently chosen, instead, to value and remember Hemingway's achievement.
The point of departure for my analysis is a concept articulated recently in
The Feminist Companion to Literature in English, namely, that of
"strategic amnesia," which has consistently legitimized and privileged
patriarchal foundations of knowledge and experience (363). My purpose here is
to demonstrate how and why the overwhelmingly patriarchal institutions of
publishing and academia, which are largely responsible for maintaining the
"consensus" about what is -- and is not -- canonical literature, have not
simply "neglected" Macaulay, but have strategically chosen to forget or ignore
the uncomfortably anti-militarist and anti-chauvinist aspects of her novel by
instead privileging the more comforting and sustaining masculinist mythos
embodied in Hemingway's text. I wish, then, to disinter an oppositional text
to Hemingway's which, as Joanna Russ has said of women's writing in general,
has suffered "premature burial" (124). This short essay intends, by
concentrating on the shifting fortunes of two novels about the Spanish Civil
War, to point up the "processes by which we canonize, valorize, and select the
texts to be remembered" (Kolodny 291).

Dale Spender, assessing the historical suppression of women writers from the
canon, in Women of Ideas, answers her rhetorical question "Why didn't we
know about these women?" (4) by arguing that "a patriarchal society depends in
large measure on the experience and values of males being perceived as the only
valid frame of reference for society" (4). Macaulay herself recognized the
problem of the invisibility of women's achievements, meanings, and values. In
1921, she stated it was "a fact that literature and thought have, anyhow till
lately, been in the main in the hands of men, and men have found themselves
unable to accept women as an ordinary, and not at all out of the way, section
of humanity" (Spender 160). She spoke too soon. As we are now consciously
realizing, women writers of Macaulay's generation have been excluded from the
Modernist canon because they were deemed insufficiently experimental,
apolitical, impersonal, universal, or allusive (Scott 5). This reiterates a
point Bonnie Kime Scott makes (7) about the seven pages devoted to 20th century
women's contributions to Modernism in Ellmann's and Fiedelson's well-known 1965
anthology, The Modern Tradition, a work 94~ pages in length. In that
compendium of Modernist thought and achievement -- itself a "classic" anthology
-- only two women, Virginia Woolf and Harriet Monroe, make an appearance (and
Monroe only by virtue of an epistolary colloquy with the real occasion for her
presence, Hart Crane).

We need only examine further many of the contemporary reviews which greeted
For Whom the Bell Tolls to gain a sense of how literary tastemakers in
1940 expressed the idea that an important work of fiction should emphasize the
serious weight of "universal" experience in war, which transcends political
agenda, as well as class and gender concerns. Times' reviewer intoned,
"the bell in this book tolls for all mankind," while The Nation asserted
that Hemingway set a new standard for himself in "compassion for the human
being faced with death." Yet viewed through the defamiliarizing lens of
Macaulay's novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls is a resolutely androcentric
and classist work, its controlling narrative consciousness almost entirely that
of the male hero's, Robert Jordan. Jordan is socially privileged by his
virtually unquestioned assumption of de facto leadership of Pilar and
Pablo's band of guerrillas. Male university professors can easily identify
with Hemingway's action-oriented and politically committed -- yet romantically
idealized -- professor of Spanish. It is largely Robert Jordan's responses to
the events and conditions of the War which govern the liberal humanist
political "message" of Hemingway's novel. Macaulay's novel, by contrast, is
more unsettling in that there is no identificatory unity provided by a single
character's sustained point of view. Instead, the controlling consciousness is
that of the satiric, skeptical, faintly mocking omniscient third-person
narrator, very purposefully Macaulay's own urbane and "donnish" (to use Woolf's
description) voice. This voice comments critically and ironically on her
characters and their responses to the trauma of civil war and its aftermath.
In consequence, contemporary reviewers stressed the novel's "light tone"
(Yale Review), its "sparkling pessimism" (Anthony West in The New
Statesman), and its "delicate playfulness" (Times Literary
Supplement), implying that Macaulay's problematic mixture of Menippean
satire, travel writing, and fantasy was merely an "amusing but quite
unimportant narrative" (Books) about the Spanish Civil War.

This privileging of certain fictional modes over others in war literature
finds consecrated expression in a work published in 1942, entitled Twentieth
Century Authors, a work which could, and still can, be found in many a
campus library reference section. The editors assert, in their Preface, that
they "have been guided less by their personal critical preferences" in choosing
their selection, "than by an effort to satisfy the general taste" (v). This is
disingenuous, surely. Such reference works are as equally crucial in shaping
tastes in literature as they are in reflecting critical consensus. A
comparison of the entries for Hemingway and Macaulay raises some crucial
questions about the politics of canon formation, especially its sexual
politics. The 160-line Hemingway entry insistently remarks on the author's
masculinist heroics, comparing him overtly to Byron (635). However much Kunitz
and Haycraft call the heroism into question by calling it "overstressed" (635),
the fact remains that Hemingway's mythification as potent "Papa" had, as early
as 1942, shaped the critical consensus and its overwhelmingly positive response
to his works. Twentieth Century Authors simply asserts that For Whom
the Bell Tolls approaches "true greatness" (636) and concludes by admitting
Hemingway into the Pantheon in the passive voice of patriarchal ex
cathedra authority: "It can be understood that Ernest Hemingway is among
the few genuinely important fiction writers of his generation" (636).
Macaulay's entry, on the other hand, is much more dismissive of her reputation
and personal life, covering a career in only 80 lines which began in 1906, when
Hemingway was barely out of short pants and little dresses. In fact, the entry
is incorrect: it was her fourth novel -- not her first, as the editors
state -- which was published in 1911, and she was aged 30 and long out of
Somerville College, Oxford, when that happened. She had published eleven
novels by 1921, the point at which Hemingway had written "nothing except for
his newspaper stories" (635). Her twenty-first novel, And No Man's Wit,
embodies, so it is implied by the author of this notably untrustworthy
biographical sketch, her "cold," "passionless," "clever," "sexless,"
"superficial" wit. The profile effectively tolls the death knell on her career
sixteen years before its end, by declaring, "In the end she has become the
victim of her own reputation," while Hemingway's reputation is only enhanced,
of course, by his "heroic" public persona. Moreover, Twentieth Century
Authors neglects to mention Macaulay's extensive travel in Spain, while
reminding us of Hemingway's pseudo-combat experience in the Spanish Civil War
with his involvement in the making of the documentary The Spanish Earth:
thus, it is inferred, he has a greater claim to authority as a recorder of that
subject. As for Macaulay's own tastes as a reader, Twentieth Century
Authors specifies that Macaulay dislikes "serious" authors and that her
favorite writers are Anatole France and Virginia Woolf. Again, the dread
phrase, "light touch" is raised with regard to Macaulay's (and, by extension,
to Wool~'s) writing (866). Even more egregiously, the entry on Macaulay speaks
of her as a "maiden aunt" and "feminine dandy" (865), whose wit is
"superficial" and "heartless" (866).

These (mis)judgments about Macaulay's life and work, it is possible to argue,
profoundly distort her accomplishments. In short, this readily available
reference work exemplifies, as well as perpetuates, to a great degree,
patriarchal resistance to women's literary production. A reading of Macaulay's
novel reveals modes of thought and expressions about the Spanish Civil War
which would have virtually guaranteed its subsequent obscurity in the
dismissive critical environment I have just described. In contrast to
Hemingway's novel, which has sustained a large part of its readership over the
first half century with its insistent endorsement of a rigorous "code of
conduct" which has the power to bestow nobility on the rugged male individual
in combat, And No Man's Wit expresses deep pessimism about the possibility of
heroism in war. Macaulay's rejection of masculinist myths of courage in this
novel attests to her lifelong dedication to pacifism and the barbed (and, yes,
often witty) articulation of antimilitarism in much of her writing. The title
alone of Macaulay's novel signifies a degree of skepticism about "uplifting"
messages about human fulfillment in war. Robert Jordan, in Hemingway's novel,
attains apotheosis as a "bridge blower," his mission accomplished and his quest
for sexual and heroic fulfillment achieved by the text's closure. Dr. Kate
Marlowe, the chief protagonist of And No Man's Wit, is a committed and
often undiplomatically outspoken socialist, feminist, and anti-imperialist who
ultimately fails in her maternal quest, namely, the search for her missing son,
Guy, a member of the International Brigades who has been swallowed up in the
maw of Franco's torture-and imprisonment machinery. At one point in the novel,
Dr. Marlowe ponders the complete futility of the Spanish Civil War for all its
participants:

Oh, what was the use? Each day, as Spain's strange, illiberal impenetrability
daunted her a little more, she sank into a drearier skepticism, not only as to
finding Guy, but as to the very foundations of her faith and his, the roots
from which she was and would be lost in a waste of strangeness, of doubt, of
disillusion and defeat. Spain was a cenotaph of lost causes and slain hopes
.... There was no finality of achievement, no settled success; once
established, all regimes rocked and toppled to destruction. Guy and his kind,
in fact, had fought to no purpose. (189)

Far from being frivolous entertainment, as the critical consensus suggested,
And No Man's Wit goes well beyond Hemingway's work in its sustained and overt
critique of Fascism; the systematic destruction of art and literature (it is
Macaulay who ponders Lorca's fate, for example); and the Vatican's complicity
in the rise of Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler. Furthermore, it is Macaulay in
1940 who shows a greater awareness of the reality of "the new Germany --
Gestapo, gleichgeschallet Press, concentration camps, and all," including the
"disposal" of the Jews (71). Determinedly anti-romantic to the last, Macaulay
does not entertain the possibility of transcendent love in the midst of war:
hence there is no fulfilled "love interest" in her novel, the sort of plot
element which pleased and shocked Hemingway's contemporary critics. (Adams in
the New York Times wrote, "I know of no love scenes in American fiction and few
in any other to compare with those of For Whom the Bell Tolls in depth and
sincerity of feeling.") Macaulay, perhaps most subversively of all,
problematizes the masculinist emphasis on homosocial relationships in the
turbulence of war. Of two of her male characters, friends as Oxford
undergraduates in the early 1930's who later find themselves on opposing sides
and renew their acquaintance in Spain on more troubled terms, she writes: "The
illusion of undergraduate friendship passed; the bitterness and
disagreeableness of three years of bloody war surged between them" (247). The
friendship between Guy and Ramon is only tenuously restored at the very close
of the novel.

For these reasons, I suggest, it is not difficult to see why And No Man's
Wit would have been relegated quickly to the mar gins of the literary
landscape by the critics, publishers, anthologists, and curriculum committees
who could have allowed Macaulay's novel to attain "power in the world," as Jane
Tompkins expresses it (qtd. in Kolodny 304). However, it was more in their
interests to canonize For Whom the Bell Tolls. Its triumphalism on this
score rested securely on certain hallmarks which have been valorized by the
patriarchy. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that by May 1949,
Hemingway's novel had received affirmation as an "instant classic" by at least
one institution of higher learning.

A decade before the U. S. Air Force Academy was actually constructed, the
all-male Planning Board's Curriculum Development Committee recommended that the
proposed sophomore "World Literature" course begin with a "modern work of
proven value and current interest ... consistent with the principle of keeping
the course relevant to the lives, interests, and needs of the Air Cadets" (13).
The novel chosen to fit these criteria was, of course, For Whom the Bell
Tolls, a work which was considered ideal "To introduce the Air Cadets,
through the study of an enjoyable modern novel which deals with aspects of the
most tragic problems of their own time, to the vitality, significance, and
interpretive power of a good novel" (13). At face value, these standards by
which we have judged certain works of literature worthy of perpetuation have
seemed unproblematic and not open to question. Yet recent feminist and
cultural materialist thought has pointed up the gendered and politicized
dynamics of canon formation and given us a deeper awareness of the degree to
which any literary landscape is violently contested terrain. Influenced by
Poststructuralist epistemologies, we are now more willing to admit that the
processes by which we universalize and canonize literary production and,
conversely, the processes by which we condemn other works to undeserved
oblivion must be consciously understood and critiqued.

As Dale Spender has asserted, "If we do not understand the process by which
hundreds of women -- often influential in their own time -- have been made to
disappear, how can we believe that what has happened" to them will not also
happen to creative women artists who are very visibly alive today? (14). In
her lifetime, Dame Rose Macaulay was hardly a negligible presence on the
Anglo-American literary scene. Indeed, Virginia Woolf's frequent diary
comments on her chief rival attest to Macaulay's visibility as a prize-winning
novelist, social and literary critic, and columnist in such well-known journals
as The Spectator, Horizon, and Time and Tide.
Nonetheless, she stands as one of countless object lessons in how literary
canonization is a process by which women authors have been subject to
misrepresentation, non-recognition, and other disadvantageous forms of cultural
control.

Works Cited

Adams, J. D. Rev. of For Whom The Bell Tolls. New York Times Book
Review. 20 Oct.1940:l.

Spender, Dale. Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them. London:
Pandora Press, 1988.

Woods, Katherine. Rev. of And No Man 's Wit.
New York Times Book Review. 27 October. 1940:6.

D.A. BOXWELL is Assistant Professor of English at the U.S. Air Force
Academy and is pursuing doctoral studies at Rutgers University. A previous
article about British women's literary responses to the Second World War
appeared in War, Literature, and the Arts, Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring 1991.

Copyright 1995, The Women in Literature and Life Assembly (WILLA) of the
National Council of Teachers of English (ISSN #1065-9080). Permission is
granted to copy any article provided credit is given and the copies are not
intended for resale.